“Oh, you modern women! You dabble in science and medicine, you dabble in politics and law, and now you dabble in the occult. What else is there left for mere man?” Today we get lost in Scotland and its folklore with Shiela Crerar, follow a plucky young woman’s psychic endeavours, admit that Flaxman Low, our old occult detective friend, may have met his match, and even trip over William Hope Hodgson.
Were it not for the fact that most of the Scots we know are dangerous and vengeful characters, this would have been entitled Shiela Crerar: The MacHorror. O Best Beloved, we are on the trail of author Ella M Scrymsour, an imaginative writer with a Dickensian name, and her female occult detective from the 1920s…
Did you ever venture beyond Three Men in a Boat and explore the world of Jerome K Jerome? You should. For not only did he write ghost stories, he also deconstructed them mercilessly. He had some surprisingly thoughtful things to say in general – and he engaged in speculative satire, which may have influenced some of the great dystopian novels of the 20th century, including works by Huxley and Orwell. Join us, then, dear listener, for more Edwardian Arcane…
Leonard Nimoy’s directorial debut, Robert E Howard trivia and Weird Tales magazine, but most importantly, women in horror. For our last post during Women in Horror Month, we visit two female authors from very different times. Welcome to Everil Worrell, a major contributor to Weird Tales magazine from 1926 onwards, and Cynthia Ward, a writer in the Here and Now. Today we’ll be mostly musing on Worrell’s ‘Canal’, and on Cynthia’s new novella Adventure of the Incognita Countess, with some of our usual odds and sod thrown in. And yes, there are female vampires (and water) involved in both…
We love many contemporary authors of weird literature and dark fantasy, However, you may have noticed that we have a mild obsession with early strange, supernatural and detective fiction. The interesting thing about hunting out women writers in the early part of the Twentieth Century is that they are there, but many are overshadowed now. Key novels and novellas by men have entered the hallowed lists as markers in the development of the weird. A number of the women in question wrote short stories which are spread out across time and different publications. Many never made single author collections, or had novels published.
EVERIL WORRELL
We’ve picked Everil Worrell (1893-1969) to mention, as she was well-regarded at the time, and a key player in Weird Tales. She was born on November 3, 1893 in Nebraska, though her family moved a number of times. A biography of Worrell, by her daughter Jeanne Eileen Murphy, was included in the first edition of Robert Weinberg’sWeird Tales Collector in 1977.
You can find more biographical details at the informative Tellers of Weird Tales site here:
She married in 1926, and in the same year began regular appearances in Weird Tales. It’s hard to verify how many stories she wrote in total – at least twenty four titles can be found. Nineteen of them certainly appeared in Weird Tales between 1926 and 1954, one under the pen-name Lireve Monet. As Everil W Murphy she also contributed two stories to Ghost Stories, a US pulp magazine which came out between 1926 and 1932.
Trivia: Ghost Stories, if you don’t know it, ran a number of original tales and reprints, including reprints of stories by Mrs Oliphant, Agatha Christie and Charles Dickens. They even ran a Robert E Howard story, ‘The Apparition in the Prize Ring’, under the name John Taverel. This story is also known as ‘The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux’, and is one of two Howard stories about black boxer Ace Jessel, the ‘ebony giant’.
It’s a shame that you can’t get a collection of her stories. You have to search for them one by one, mostly as magazine scans or old archives, or through her infrequent presence in anthologies. Eric Davin, in his book Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965, points out:
“Some of the highest reader-voted stories in the entire existence of Weird Tales were by female authors Greye La Spinya… and Everil Worrell (The Bird of Space 1926)”
Davin, 2005
She made the cover of Weird Tales three times, starting with that September 1926 story ‘The Bird of Space’, which isn’t bad considering this was in the first year she was with Weird Tales.
Her last appearance was in the March 1954 issue, only a few months before Weird Tales gave up the ghost, thus giving her one of the longest involvement with the magazine of all their regular writers.
Rather neatly, her appearance in September 1926 was twinned with ‘The Projection of Armand Dubois’ by Henry S Whitehead, one of our favourite of the ‘period weird’ writers. And a month later, her story ‘Cattle of Furos’ was in print along with ‘Jumbee’, another well-known tale by Whitehead.
Her work was spread across various speculative genres or sub-genres – supernatural and ghostly, science fiction, fantasy and horror. Our particular interest here is in her story ‘The Canal’, which is an unashamed vampire horror story, and quite a neat one.
“Past the sleeping city the river sweeps; along its left bank the old canal creeps. I did not intend that to be poetry, although the scene is poetic—somberly, gruesomely poetic, like the poems of Poe. I know it too well—I have walked too often over the grass-grown path beside the reflections of black trees and tumble-down shacks and distant factory chimneys in the sluggish waters that moved so slowly, and ceased to move at all. I have always had a taste for nocturnal prowling.”
This night-time wanderer encounters a half-sunken barge, and its strange occupants, only to find that a passing fancy becomes more complicated and horrifying than expected. If he follows his initial instincts, he may unleash something on the world beyond the canal.
First published in December 1927, ‘The Canal’ was adapted for television in an episode of Rod Serling’sNight Gallery. Rewritten a tad, the episode was called ‘Death on a Barge’, and released in March 1973. The strapline they used is a touch peculiar:
“A fishmonger ignores his friends’ warnings when he falls for a wraith-like young woman.”
More Trivia:It’s fun to note that ‘Death on a Barge was Leonard Nimoy’s directorial debut. Nimoy didn’t direct again until Vincent (1981) a one-man filmed play of his adaptation of “Van Gogh” (1979) by Phillip Stephens. The young woman was played by Lesley Ann Warren, who was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for the 1982 film Victor/Victoria. No vampires in that, though.
lesley ann downs in night gallery
‘The Canal’ story seems to be in the public domain, and you can read the whole story here:
You can also find it in Weird Vampire Tales: 30 Blood-Chilling Stories from the Weird Fiction Pulps (1992), which is available second-hand from various sources. This great thick collection happens to include “The Antimacassar” by Greye La Spina, another female author we mentioned briefly above.
Right, let’s salute Everil Worrell, skip a lot of decades and come to our other work for the day. Cynthia Ward actually first came to our attention via a book she and fellow-writer Nisi Shawl wrote, Writing the Other. This is an interesting set of meditations on approaching writing and diversity:
‘Nisi and Cynthia collaborated to develop a workshop… with the aim of both increasing writers’ skill and sensitivity in portraying difference in their fiction as well as allaying their anxieties about “getting it wrong.” Writing the Other: A Practical Approach is the manual that grew out of their workshop. It discusses basic aspects of characterization and offers elementary techniques, practical exercises, and examples for helping writers create richer and more accurate characters with “differences.”‘
Cynthia herself has published a number of fantastical tales in various anthologies such as Athena’s Daughters, Wax and Wane and Sword and Sorceress.
This February, Aqueduct Press released her new novella, The Adventure of the Incognita Countess. As the novella has vampires and is set on the waters (albeit the Atlantic rather than canals and rivers), we thought we should pair her with Everil Worrell. How’s that for tenuous?
We admit to being fans of period espionage, occult and the whole caboodle, so we may not be unbiased over this one. Just read the blurb:
“It’s the easiest assignment a British intelligence agent could hope for. Lucy Harker needs only see the secret plans of the Nautilus safely across the Atlantic. As German spies are largely a fantasy of newspapers, she anticipates no activities more strenuous than hiding her heritage as Dracula’s dhampir daughter. Then among her fellow Titanic passengers she discovers the incognita Countess Karnstein—and it seems the seductive vampire is in Germany’s service. Can Agent Harker stake Carmilla before her own heart—and her loyalty to the British Empire—are subverted by questions as treacherous as a night-cloaked iceberg?”
(A dhampir or dhampyre, incidentally, is a half-breed cross between a vampire and a human, who can bear the light of the sun, and so forth, but has certain extraordinary abilities. The term comes originally from Balkan folk-stories.)
We are indeed in classic Carmilla territory – treachery, hidden secrets and lesbian vampires, but with a difference, and with some nice nods to other period sources. This is not quite Sheridan Le Fanu’s take on things. We particularly enjoyed the connections with H G Wells’sWar of the Worlds, and the use of recovered Martian technology by the British Empire. Heat-rays up, girls, and at ’em.
Lucy Harker here is a rather likeable character, though ready to do what British Intelligence demands of her despite her own feelings. We were also amused by the addition of one Lord Greyborough, who may have an affection for apes in his background. We leave you to work out the links there.
“From the sudden flaring of the viscount’s nostrils and tensing of his body, it’s clear Lord Greyborough has also caught her scent. Has he recognised she’s a type of vampire? Perhaps more importantly, how did he detect her scent at all? He’s human; his scent makes that clear. And humans, compared to monsters and animals, essentially have no sense of smell.”
Add in mention of the Nautilus, international political intrigue and the fateful voyage of the Titanic, and you have plenty with which to play.
The Adventure of the Incognita Countess is available now, in paperback and Kindle formats – link below:
Women in Horror Month may be closing down for this year, but we at greydogtales don’t worry about that sort of thing too much. We will continue to salute other female writers of horror and the weird as we bumble our way along. As you do. Join us in a few days for more of our dubious scholarship, trivia and features…
Female writers are a bit like male ones, really. Some of them are outstanding, and some of them produce tosh. So one of the more sensible things to do during Women in Horror Month is to look at the actual works, and point out the many striking dark stories you can find by women. Today, we bring you Edith Wharton, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, and Mary E Wilkins Freeman. And some of what follows includes a serious look at the changing nature of supernatural fiction.
Yes, here we are with Part Three of The History of Women in Horror, exploring some scary writing by women in the early Twentieth Century…
the history of women in horror
The first decades of the century were a difficult time for women (as opposed to all the laid back, easy times they’d had before). Men were busy making important political and military decisions, and killing each other. Women, meanwhile, idled away their time with such frivolities as keeping their children alive, repopulating devastated countries, nursing wounded men, and working in munitions factories.
“Definitions of femininity and of women’s social roles were in flux. During World War I, women had gained jobs that had hitherto been held only by men; afterward, women’s job options again narrowed. England’s two million “surplus women” were newly identified as a social problem, suffragettes were demonstrating, Freud’s works were in the bookshops, and hems were on the rise. “
Katherine Bischoping & Riley Olstead, The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (2013)
Some women went all literary, and charged their writing with hidden meanings which could only be decoded by boys who knew the secret handshake. A few broke out in attacks of initials (see also Part 1) and pretended to be men for publishing purposes. But many female writers produced works of distinctive supernatural and weird fiction under their own names. We’ve picked three of the earlier writers, with illustrative stories, to show what you may be missing.
Mary E Wilkins Freeman
Mary E Wilkins Freeman is our first pick, because this allows us to mention stories which straddle the boundaries between Victoriana and the weird. The period up to the First World War was a transitional time, as shadows lurked behind those Edwardian summers. Society was changing, and the black crepe was gradually being shed. Gothic had gone, and weird was coming in, though there was still a place for straightforward ghost tales.
Freeman had an odd enough life. She had a strict religious upbringing, and lost both her parents by the age of 31, leaving her to try and make money by writing. At the age of fifty she married a chap with alcohol and drug problems, who ended up being admitted to a hospital for the insane. On his death she inherited $1.
Sidenote:There is a detailed biography of Freeman which includes analysis of her writings overall, and which is relevant to the changes going on in writing and society. This is In a Hidden Closet: The Life and Work of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, by Leah Blatt Glasser (1996).
It “explores the multiple tensions at the core of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s life and work. A prolific short story writer and novelist, Freeman (1852-1930) developed a reputation as a local colorist who depicted the peculiarities of her native New England… Freeman was one of the first American authors to write extensively about the relationships women form outside of marriage and motherhood, the role of work in women’s lives, the complexity of women’s sexuality, and the interior lives of women who rebel rather than conform to patriarchal strictures.”
She was a respected and prolific writer, and is still famous in ghostly circles for her story ‘Luella Miller’. This is notable for being a sort of vampire story, but more subtle and unusual than the old type (there’s a nice reading by our friend Morgan Scorpion on Librivox).
‘Shadows on the Wall’ is another good tale which might almost be called Jamesian (but this is an over-used adjective). Much of the story, seen from the point of view of three women in a household, is concerned with the building tension which follows a man’s death, seemingly from natural causes. It is a simple tale, reminiscent of the old style of ghost story, yet the way in which the women interact and develop their concerns is deftly handled.
Quite different is ‘The Hall Bedroom’ (1905), and we mention this one because it enters the weirder zone which was to follow in supernatural fiction. Rooms that are ‘different’, and hints of the fifth dimension, together with the way in which the story unfolds, gives hints of what would come with H P Lovecraft and others – stories which evoke sensations and suggest the possibility of science beyond our ken, without the standard resolutions. The writer and anthologist Dorothy Scarborough cited ‘The Hall Bedroom’ as
“One of the best illustrations of the use of dream imagery and impressions.”
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)
All the above are in The Wind in the Rose Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). Some time after Freeman’s death, Arkham House released a collection of all eleven of her known supernatural stories (Collected Ghost Stories, 1974).
Both of the stories are available on audio:
Shadows on the Wall
The Hall Bedroom
A somewhat altered version of ‘Shadows’ was made for TV as part of the Night Gallery series – “Certain Shadows on the Wall” December 30, 1970.
“The shadow of a recently deceased woman (Agnes Moorehead) remains cast on the parlor wall to haunt her sinister brother.”
They meant ‘parlour’, of course.
More trivia: Despite having been in Citizen Kane and other major films, Agnes Moorehead is remembered by many today for playing Endora in Bewitched, the sixties and seventies TV series. We assume that her character’s name was a play on the Witch of Endor, from the jolly old Bible.
Katharine E Fullerton Gerould
Next comes Katharine Elizabeth Fullerton Gerould (1879 – 1944), an American writer and essayist. Unlike Freeman, she was a noted writer by the time she reached her early twenties, highly educated and adept at essay and short story alike. From 1902 onwards she wrote regularly for major journals, and between 1911 and 1929, she published nearly fifty short stories. Her small number of novels didn’t go down so well.
Girlish Trivia: Although few know her 1931 novel The Light That Never Was, the classic SF writer Lloyd Biggle Jr wrote a novel of the same name in 1972. It’s an interesting book, dealing with non-human refugees on the human artist colony of Donov, and the nature of art and creativity. Worth looking out for. Bloody men, coming over here and stealing our titles…
Gerould’s essays are interesting as well. Given that we brushed against Lord Byron, very badly, in Part One, we liked her 1922 article on why people were so peculiar about Byron – ‘Men, Women, And The Byron-Complex’ (Atlantic Monthly):
“Ninety-eight years ago, in April, 1824, Lord Byron died at Missolonghi. But in the non-academic world of letters no one, apparently, either knows or cares whether Byron was a great poet. No one… either knows or cares, as we have said, whether he was a better or a worse letter-writer than we had thought. After a hundred years, the sole question that impassions people is: ‘Just how much of a cad was he?’”
Her stranger stories are hard to find, but she wrote tales such as ‘The Eighty Third’ (1916), which was collected in Tales of Dungeons and Dragons, edited by Peter Haining (1986). She was known at one time for her story ‘On the Staircase’ (1913), of which Dorothy Scarborough said:
“Warning spirits of futurity are seen [in this story], where each man beholds his own destiny,—one seeing the spectral snake that afterwards kills him in a hunting expedition, one the ghost of a Zulu, the savage that almost destroys him some time afterwards, and the last the ghost of a young woman in a blue dress, the woman whom he marries and who hounds him to his death. She presently sees her own fate, too, but what it is the author does not tell us. One curious incident in the story is the instantaneous appearance on the stairs of the woman herself and her ghostly double, one in a white dress, one in the fatal blue. This sort of spectral warning, this wireless service for the conveyance of bad news and hint of threatening danger, serves to link the ghost story of the present with those of the past.”
The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)
Gerould is also worth noting because she had connections with our last author for today, Edith Wharton. Wharton helped Gerould to get published by Scribners, but the two writers got caught up in a romantic triangle involving Gerould’s promiscuous journalist cousin, William Morton Fullerton. Wharton, though married, had an affair with him on and off between 1906 and 1910, yet he also got engaged to Gerould at the same time – and was living with a French woman in Paris. Blimey.
Edith Wharton
Which leads us nicely onto the stories of the best known of our three, Edith Wharton (1862-1937) herself. A social whirl, novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner, Nobel nominee – and she worked in Paris during the First World War to protect French women and children. Rather impressive.
It would be a bit redundant to clog greydogtales with her biography, which is easily found, or details of The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth etc. We merely want to mention her contribution to supernatural and horror literature.
“Of particular interest are Wharton’s stories of the uncanny and the supernatural, like the grisly “A Bottle of Perrier,” set in the North African desert, and the chilling “All Souls’,” written just before her death. An unacknowledged master of American horror fiction, Wharton’s lucid prose makes all the more powerful her exploration of the irrational forces underlying ordinary life.”
Library of America
Wharton tended to more subtle horrors. Much is suggested but not nailed down:
“When the reader’s confidence is gained the next rule of the game is to avoid distracting and splintering his attention. Many a would-be tale of horror becomes innocuous through the very multiplication and variety of its horrors. Above all, if they are multiplied they should be cumulative and not dispersed. But the fewer the better: once the preliminary horror is posited, it is the harping on the same string — the same nerve — that does the trick. Quiet iteration is far more racking than the diversified assaults; the expected is more frightful than the unforeseen.”
Edith Wharton, “The Writing of Fiction,” Scribner’s Magazine (1925)
We want to slip in three stories of hers before we go. ‘The Duchess at Prayer’ (1902) is a dark tale of love and ruin, concerning a Duke’s unwelcome gift of a statue to his wife, and its impact.
“I saw how admirably the sculptor had caught the poise of her head, the tender slope of the shoulder; then I crossed over and looked into her face — it was a frozen horror. Never have hate, revolt and agony so possessed a human countenance…”
It’s been suggested that Wharton was influenced by both Balzac and Edgar Allan Poe, with resemblances to aspects of Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’. There’s no doubt that it harks back to earlier eerie tales from the Victorian period, though it is still Wharton.
‘Triumph of Night’ (1914) is a different tale, one of implications rather than overt horror. It is a story of ‘doubles’, where more is revealed by the double of one John Lavington than can be seen in his human face. Doubt and failure pervade the story.
Best of all is ‘The Eyes’ (1910), from Edith Wharton’s collection Tales of Men and Ghosts. This stands out as a move beyond the classic ghost story. A seemingly convivial telling of tales develops into a confrontation with truths about life – our failures and our weaknesses. Without a Gothic skeleton, ominous shadow or white sheet in sight, Wharton introduces us to the unknown, and quite deliberately does not give us all the answers. The descriptive prose is fascinating:
“The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken. One lid drooped a little lower than the other, with the effect of a crooked leer; and between these folds of flesh, with their scant bristle of lashes, the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim, looked like sea pebbles in the grip of a starfish.”
And it is scary, but not in the usual way. For those who like a touch of style, all of Wharton’s supernatural stories are available from the rather nice Tartarus Press, either as a collector’s edition or in e-format:
http://amzn.eu/cWV6WGZ
http://www.tartaruspress.com/wharton-the-triumph-of-night.html